The Floor That Feels Colder Than It Is

This is the time of year when the bathroom floor starts to bite. You step out of the shower, and the tile feels like it just came out of the fridge.

It didn't. It's the same temperature as everything else in the room, and the reason it feels so much colder is one of the neat bits of physics hiding in your house.

Below: why tile feels colder than wood, the TV setting that makes movies look cheap, why a dripping faucet saves a frozen pipe, why the doorbell camera fades in the cold, the tiny storm inside your shower, and the pad we'd put under a rug.

Reply and tell us: barefoot or slippers at your house? We read every one.

Leave a tile floor, a wood floor and a wool rug in the same room overnight, and by morning they're all the same temperature. Step on each one barefoot, and the tile feels coldest by far.

What your feet feel is how fast heat leaves your skin.

Your feet are warmer than the floor, so heat flows out of them into whatever you're standing on. Some materials carry it away fast, and some barely take it at all.

A free physics textbook, OpenStax College Physics, uses this exact example. Skin on tile loses more heat in the same amount of time than skin on carpet, so the temperature of your skin drops faster, and the tile feels colder.

The property behind it is called thermal conductivity, a measure of how easily heat moves through a material. Here's how the textbook's numbers line up, where higher means faster:

That last line is the secret of a rug. Wool fibers hold tiny pockets of air, and air is a lousy path for heat, so a rug keeps your body heat right where your feet are.

Tile isn't alone, either. A brick hearth or a glass tabletop sits right next to tile on the textbook's list, which is why both feel cold to the touch too.

TLDR: all three floors are room temperature. Tile just moves heat out of your feet the fastest.

So the fix for a cold floor is a layer between you and it, and it doesn't take much: a rug by the bed, a mat by the tub, slippers by the door. Renters need no permission for any of it.

Scroll down for the pad we'd put under that rug.

If a big movie on your TV looks like a daytime soap or a home video, you're not imagining it. The usual culprit is a setting called motion smoothing.

Movies are usually shot at 24 frames a second, and the slight blur when things move is part of how film looks. Motion smoothing has the TV make up extra frames in between the real ones, so motion turns slick and too smooth. People call it the soap opera effect.

The fix lives in your picture settings. Brands name it differently, so look for a setting with "motion" in its name and switch it off for movie night.

Easier still, look for Filmmaker Mode. Per TechCrunch, it's a picture preset from the UHD Alliance, an industry group of TV and film companies. In one go it turns off motion smoothing, along with noise reduction and sharpening.

LG, Panasonic and Vizio were the first brands to commit to it. It can switch on with a button on the remote, or by itself when a movie's data calls for it.

Like smoothing for the game? That's fine. Switching presets takes a second, so keep one for sports and one for movies.

Water expands as it freezes, and on a bitter night the trouble starts with the water trapped behind the ice.

Per This Old House, once an ice plug forms, the water between the ice and a closed faucet has nowhere to go. As the ice keeps growing, pressure in that trapped stretch climbs until the pipe gives way, often at a weak point.

A dripping faucet relieves that pressure and keeps a little water moving. That's the whole trick.

The pipes most at risk run through unheated spaces like basements and attics, or along exterior walls, including the ones under a sink on an outside wall.

On the coldest nights, This Old House suggests:

If a tap gives you only a trickle on a bitter morning, a pipe may already be frozen. Leave that faucet open and call a plumber, or your landlord if you rent.

If your battery doorbell camera seems to drain faster once the mornings turn frosty, the cold is the likely reason. Ring's own temperature notes show why.

Batteries run on chemistry, and cold slows it down. Ring says its battery devices work normally down to -4 F, but once it gets around freezing, the battery won't last as long.

The camera keeps working well below freezing, while the battery runs down sooner.

There's a second catch. Ring says its devices are designed to stop charging below freezing, so a camera on a solar charger can sit through a cold snap without topping up at all.

Got another brand? Its support pages will list its own temperature range, so check before the first hard freeze. A full charge before the first frost is the cheapest fix there is.

You turn on the shower, and the curtain drifts in and sticks to your leg. For years, the common explanation was that fast-moving water lowers the air pressure inside the shower.

In 2001, a University of Massachusetts engineer named David Schmidt put it to the test with a computer model of a shower, running about 1.5 trillion calculations. He built the whole thing in software, a virtual shower on a $28,000 program, and let it run.

Per Discover magazine, he found the opposite of the usual story. The falling drops slow down from air drag, and as they do, they pull the air around them into a swirling, tornado-like vortex.

The center of that vortex is low pressure. The air in the rest of the bathroom pushes harder, and a lightweight curtain gets shoved in toward the spray.

The spray alone sets the vortex spinning, which is why the curtain moves even before you step in.

So the curtain that grabs at you is the thin, light one. A heavier curtain or liner has more weight to resist the push.

Next time it happens, you can blame a very small weather system.

If the tile by the bed or the kitchen sink is your cold spot, a rug is the fix, and a good pad makes that rug work harder.

The one we'd point you to is the Mohawk Home Non Slip Rug Pad, 5 by 8 feet, at $40.49. It's a quarter inch of recycled felt with a latex rubber backing.

The felt adds one more layer between your feet and the floor, and Mohawk lists insulation and sound absorption among what it does. The rubber side grips the floor so the rug doesn't slide or bunch, which matters on slick tile.

Lay it felt side up on hard floors. It trims with scissors, and it's made in the USA with a one-year limited warranty.

We haven't lived on this one through a winter ourselves. The specs and price come from Mohawk's Amazon listing.

That said, it only works under a rug. On its own it's a sheet of gray felt, so pair it with a rug you already have or plan to buy.

Links in this post may be affiliate links. The Home Wire may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.

That's Wednesday: why tile steals heat, the TV setting to switch off, the drip that saves a pipe, the doorbell's cold-weather limit, and the tiny storm in your shower.

If you only do one thing this week, find the motion setting on your TV before movie night.

Forward this to whoever in your house hogs the bath mat.

See you tomorrow.

The Home Wire

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